James O’Keefe and Veritas Divide the Big Haters from the Little Haters on the Right

New Orleans What goes around does eventually come around. In organizing, we have to believe that with every fiber of our being in order to prevail on a daily basis.

And, that brings me once again to James O’Keefe, the far right wing video scammer and fake journalist, whose mission along with his tax exempt Project Veritas and his tax protected Project Veritas Action Fund, is supposedly to expose media and liberal-left bias. In his latest in a chain of flubs, he tried to plant a false story with the Washington Post about Alabama’s Judge Roy Moore raping a woman of 15 and was totally exposed.

It’s a mystery how he has any credibility anywhere, but this boo-boo has brought more condemnation than most because his bungling at the Post was stepping on the toes of one of the biggest hitters in the fraternity of elite media, prompting the New York Times even to finally take a harder look at this scammer now, even though only years ago they splashed a profile of him all over their magazine section as he chilled out in New Jersey waiting for his probation to end for trying to mess with former Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones in a New Orleans federal building, a big no-no that got him a criminal record for ineptness.

We do learn some amazing things though, now that they are looking at him more closely. They bothered to look at his IRS filings since he won an exemption for Veritas in 2010. He’s raked in $16 million, averaging almost $2.3 million per year for his mess, and a nice fat pay check in 2016 of $317,000. It turns out that’s chump change compared to a more reserved conservative outfit with a similar goal of exposing bias, the Media Research Center, run by Brent Bozell. They have raised $87 million in about the same time period, five times more than O’Keefe. That’s $100 million combined for this fool’s errand: it boggles the mind! The liberal-left are pikers when it comes to this kind of media, shall we call it, “accountability” effort.

Poor James O’Keefe can’t seem to get to the big bucks because he keeps stepping on his own feet with his fake tactics, scurrilous editing techniques, and house of lies. The Mercers, who act as Daddy and Daughter Warbucks for Steve Bannon, won’t touch him after having put their finger in the water. Same for the billionaire DeVos family now represented in Washington by the Secretary of Education. The Koch Brothers who are the gold standard on the far right funder scene reportedly won’t even give him a meeting. Hard to believe, but they are all probably afraid he will record them and try to blackmail them later. I get that. He takes the little haters, and his competitors get the big haters. Eventually that will catch up with him, I hope.

Thanks to the Times, they did report on another of his “aborted plots,” as they called them involving his ACORN takedown. As they report,

“Other aborted plots appeared to be driven by a combination of enmity for the establishment media and Mr. O’Keefe’s grievances about not being taken seriously by the media. A 2010 Project Veritas memo proposed using ‘moles at The Los Angeles Times’ to embarrass a media critic there who had questioned the tactics and accuracy of the ACORN videos, and also suggested nominating the videos for a Pulitzer Prize, then exposing the bias of the judges by secretly recording their deliberations.”

Wow! Pride cometh before a fall, as the axiom holds, and he’s hopefully nearing the bottom of his well. I imagine that he and the President are mainly able to bond over their total narcissism. Trump’s reported in-depth analysis of O’Keefe’s work after their meeting was essentially that he’s “a good-looking guy.” That says it all, or in Latin to quote my old teacher, Dr. Romeo, de gustibus non disputandum est or to each his own, about taste there is no agreement. Enough said.